Betita Martínez

Betita Martínez, byname of Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, (born December 12, 1925, Washington, D.C., U.S.), American activist who fought against poverty, racism, and militarism in the United States.

Born to an American mother and a Mexican father, Martínez grew up in a generally comfortable economic environment in the United States. Her father told her stories of the Mexican Revolution and about policies of U.S. imperialism and fostered her awareness of the discrimination suffered by Mexican immigrants. She also experienced firsthand the effects of discrimination as a child of colour in all-white schools in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.

Martínez graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1946 with a degree in history and literature. She then began working in the United NationsSecretariat as a researcher on conditions in non-self-governing territories (European and U.S. colonies) in Africa and the Pacific. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, she worked as an editor for the publisher Simon & Schuster and later as books and arts editor at The Nation.

In the early 1960s she began working as a volunteer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a way of fighting racism and supporting the civil rights movement. Between 1964 and 1967 Martínez was director of the New York City office of SNCC and also a SNCC traveling representative in Mississippi and Alabama, one of only two Latina SNCC staff members.

After moving to New Mexico in 1968, Martínez cofounded El Grito del Norte, an activist Chicano movement newspaper. She also cofounded the Chicano Communications Center in Albuquerque in 1973, which used theatre, music, and guest speakers to educate Chicanos about history and current issues in their struggles for justice. By 1982 she had moved to San Francisco, where she became the program director of Global Options, an advocacy organization for labour and social issues. She joined the socialist Democratic Workers Party and ran for governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1983. In 1997 she cofounded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco, which served to combat white supremacy and advance solidarity among people of colour. Between 2002 and 2003 she was one of the editors of the antiwar newspaper War Times, which was founded in response to U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite a stroke she suffered in 2005, Martínez continued to lecture and collaborate with Latino youth groups.